Ancestry.com, the Provo-based family history online research company, hopes to go public with an initial offering of up to $75 million of shares.

In its prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company formerly know as The Generations Network reported revenues of $197.6 million and a profit of $2.38 million in 2008.

Its main Web site, Ancestry.com, offers monthly subscriptions for access to its millions of genealogical records, plus gives subscribers the ability to build family trees and share information and documents with others.

The company indicated it might use some of the new capital for acquisitions of other companies, products or technologies.

Ancestry.com declined to comment on Friday, citing a required "quiet period" before the stock sale.

But Daren Shaw, a managing director of investment banking for D.A. Davidson & Co. in Salt Lake City, said initial public offerings are beginning to pick up after a dramatic falloff the past year as the recession took hold.

"It is just now, over the last couple of months, beginning to show some signs of life, and we are starting to see some increased activity, but very selectively," he said.

A Utah-based company hasn't had an IPO since EnergySolutions in November of 2007.

Renaissance Capital of Greenwich, Conn., a firm that researches IPOs for institutional investors, reports that there have been 18 IPOs this year in the United States

The FTSE Renaissance IPO Composite Index, which tracks the performance of IPO stocks, has returned 32 percent so far this year, compared with 10.4 percent for the S&P 500.

"While the numbers are down, the returns are very strong, setting the stage for more companies willing to put their toe in the water," said Kathy Smith, a Renaissance official. "I believe that's what's behind Ancestry.com."

With interest rates near zero, investors are building up an appetite for IPOs that will pay good returns, said Smith.

In its SEC prospectus, Ancestry.com said the stock sale will take place sometime after 180 days from its filing on Monday.

The company may have to pay 25 percent of what it raises to CIT Lending Services to reduce its debt to the financially troubled lender, the prospectus said.

It cited long-term debt of $117 million stemming from the December 2007 sale of a majority ownership of the company to Spectrum Equity Investors and affiliated entities.

In required warnings about the risks of owning stock in the company, Ancestry.com cited competition, particularly from the family-research arm of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that is putting millions of its records online over the next couple of years.

The company now has 44 shareholders who own 76.6 million shares of common stock. The IPO underwriters are Morgan Stanley & Co., Merrill Lynch, BMO Capital Markets, Jefferies & Co. and Piper Jaffray & Co.

tharvey@sltrib.com

Reader's note: this story has been corrected to fix the last name of Shaw